My colleague Jon Mandle has been looking at John Rawls 1950 doctoral dissertation, A Study in The Grounds of Ethical Knowledge. Jon asked me about a section in which Rawls contrasts ethical theory and scientific theory. The philosophy of science that he presumes is really just background. Yet he discusses what is now often called the Duhem-Quine Problem, a couple of years before Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". So where did Rawls get it from?

I did not have a good answer to this, beyond the obvious suggestion. So I decided to share the interesting bit here.